Donald Trump Has Secret Plan to Destroy ISIS by Using Profanity - By Jonathan Chait
Donald Trump has a secret plan to defeat ISIS and has explained that he can’t reveal its details, lest he tip off the enemy. But a careful study of his rhetoric reveals a crucial aspect of the plan: the strategic deployment of profane threats.
In an interview with Fox News today, Trump promised to “knock the hell out of” ISIS. This may sound simplistic to the untrained ear. In reality, Trump has carefully varied the exact formulation of his policy. He has promised to “bomb the hell out of” ISIS. But Trump has also promised to “bomb the shit out of” them. As a result, ISIS has no way of knowing whether it should defend against a shit-bombing or a hell-bombing. Even more cannily, Trump has also threatened to “knock the shit out of” ISIS and to “knock the hell out of them.”
Does knocking mean the same thing as bombing, or does it imply a completely different tactic? We have no way of knowing, and, more important, neither does ISIS. Trump is forcing ISIS to prepare for having either the shit or the hell bombed or knocked out of them. It could be any of these four things, or maybe all of them. This is exactly the kind of strategy proposed by Sun Tzu, or Clausewitz, or maybe both them.
In his Fox News interview, Steve Doocy pressed Trump for specifics:
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/trump-has-secret-plan-to-destroy-isis-by-using-profanity.html?
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say about 3- and 4-year olds who are drawn to the Hulk because they grok his problem-solving abilities ("Hulk Smash!"
?
Listening to Trump, he seems to want to employ roughly the same strategy for resolving international crises in the Middle East.
They are really scared of that one
